The present invention relates to memcomputing systems for performing mixed precision calculations.
Many conventional computing systems utilize a von Neumann architecture, in which a central processing unit (CPU) including an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) performs computations and may interact with a separate memory unit that provides storage. However, in recent years, the need for alternative architectures has become apparent. Voltage and thus frequency scaling has slowed. To continue the growth predicted by Moore's law, circuit designers have turned to multicore chips and parallelism. However, such solutions may consume relatively large amounts of energy per computation, which may negatively impact the energy efficiency of the computing system.
Memcomputing is a computational paradigm where the computation and logic co-exist in the so-called computational memory. The memcomputing paradigm can address some important computational tasks with high areal/power efficiency. However, significant challenges to practical memcomputing arise due to issues such as device variability, stochasticity, noise etc. These issues cause the computational precision obtainable with conventional memcomputing techniques to be insufficient for many computational tasks.
Accordingly, a need arises for techniques by which computations may be performed using memcomputing that may provide improved precision over conventional memcomputing techniques.